Message in a Klein Bottle

Message in a Klein Bottle

 

 

You think you’ve found a message fit to read–
so go ahead and flog your eyeballs through.
Direct and outward-looking, you’ll proceed.
But constantly the message will renew
its twisted involution. There are few
readers who feel at home in surfaces
like this one. You will be uncertain, too–
yet trapped and pinned down by a foreign quiz.
Don’t respond. Here the weight of words like is
cannot be measured, never stays the same.
If there’s a Devil, then this world is his–
and here he plays his most disturbing game.
The emptiness your heart will not admit
here yawns so wide that you’ll acknowledge it.

 

 

–Tom Riley

 

 

(First appeared in Blue Unicorn, v. 37, n. 2, June 2015.)